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Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926)
Guitar Music, Vol. 1
There can be few other living composers who have had such
remarkable success with an extraordinary quantity of music in all genres. A
brief glance at Henze's catalogue outlines a formidable series of symphonies, stage
works (both opera and ballet), concertos and quartets, and it is on these
large-scale and solidly Teutonic structures, often unconventional in formal design
and personal in their approach, that his stature as one of Europe's foremost
composers rests.
Born in Westphalia in 1926, Henze received his earliest
musical training against the background of Nazism, becoming a reluctant recruit
into the Hitler Youth movement and, in 1944, serving as a radio operator with a
Panzer division. After the war he returned to his formal education, studying
first with Wolfgang Fortner, and later with René Leibowitz in Darmstadt and Paris, where he encountered serial techniques. It was, however, the music of Stravinsky, Hindemith
and Schoenberg that Henze turned to as models for his earliest neo-classical
pieces whose innate lyricism was to mark his oeuvre across a sixty-year composing
career. Both his first Violin Concerto and First Symphony of 1947
quickly established Henze as Germany's answer to the musical vacuum resulting from
the aftermath of Nazism.
Unhappy with post war social attitudes and ashamed of Germany's recent past he moved to Italy in 1953; first to Ischia, then Naples, and eventually
settling near Rome. From this southern move a new, sunny radiance filtered into
his compositions that generated a sequence of stage works beginning in 1955
with König Hirsch (King Stag) and culminating, ten years later, with his
unparalleled operatic success The Bassarids. From the late 1960s there
followed a series of politically motivated works (with overtly communist
sympathies), that included the ill fated Hamburg premiere of his oratorio The
Raft of the Medusa, the chamber piece El Cimarrón and his opera La
Cubana. As well as these large-scale 'public' works Henze found time in the
1970s for a number of more private projects, including three string quartets,
and his two Shakespearean themed guitar sonatas.
This Second Sonata on Shakespearean Characters dates
from 1978-79 and, like the first from three years earlier, was prompted by the
distinguished guitarist Julian Bream. The three character studies from the second
group complete a cycle of nine solo guitar pieces (six in the first set) that
begin with a mad king and end with a mad queen. Henze makes virtuosic demands in
all of these works, extending the boundaries of guitar technique in a
comprehensive survey that brings to mind, on a different level, the great
keyboard works by Bach or Beethoven. Indeed, when Julian Bream first approached
Henze for a solo guitar work he had jokingly suggested a piece on the scale of
Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata.
In 'Sir Andrew Aguecheek' Henze uses a kind of additive
variation form to portray the gullible and melancholy knight from Twelfth
Night who was 'adored once'. A minor key march, pedestrian in character and
suggestive perhaps both of a naïve energy and determined will, frames passages,
ritornello-like, in which the recurring breakdown of tonality mirrors
Sir Andrew's own failure in life. Appoggiaturas and sweet-sounding chords point
to his gentle nature.
This gentle mood is carried over in 'Bottom's Dream', (the
dream of the simple weaver from A Midsummer Night's Dream) in which the
opening thirds convey his serene dream-like state. Melodic compactness and
counterpoint punctuated by frequent rests and empty bars create a sense of
elasticity and pleasant languor.
This mood is swept aside by the dramatic motif beginning the
remarkably imaginative and searching portrait of Mad Lady Macbeth. The
opening malevolent flourish conveys, in just a few notes, her ruthless power and
volatile mood. In its dissonance, sudden changes of pace and weight and
restless central dance episodes, Henze draws us into her unstable state of
mind, bringing motivic ideas back a half step higher to depict Lady Macbeth's
rising hysteria.
This Second Sonata was first performed in Brussels in 1980 by Reinbert Evers.
The three Hölderlin settings form part of what may be
likened to an extended song-cycle that Henze called Kammermusik 1958, a
work for tenor and guitar soloists with eight other instruments setting
Friedrich Hölderlin's In lieblicher Bläue (In lovely blueness). Written
following a visit to Greece (the inspiration also for Hölderlin's poem), the
work was commissioned by North German Radio. Its virtuosic vocal writing, covering
a range of two octaves, is largely atonal and expressionistic; its musical
language recalling his brief preoccupation with serialism at Darmstadt. By deliberate
contrast (Henze musically illustrates the polarity between the world of ancient
Greece and the modern world), the writing for the guitar is far less complex:
in the first, the accompaniment looks back across the centuries to a Dowland
lute-song, the second is more contemporary and chromatic, while the third borrows
from Benjamin Britten to whom the work is dedicated.
Henze's Drei Tentos, three intermezzos, like the Drei
Fragmente nach Hölderlin were also originally part of Kammermusik 1958 and
are short, very approachable pieces that feature in every professional guitarist's
repertoire. The first piece, essentially lyrical, is characterized by a
terseness of material based on a recurring four-note motif, with a high
tessitura and a dynamic level that rarely rises above pianissimo. The second
features driving rhythms that propel the semiquaver movement forward in the
manner of Stravinsky. Lyricism returns in the third, this time with melodic contours
of Neapolitan origin.
Selbst und Zwiegespräche (Monologues and Dialogues), a chamber work for viola,
guitar and organ (or piano as recorded here) dates from 1984-1985, the period
between his two operas The English Cat and Das verratene Meer and
roughly contemporary with his Seventh Symphony. Henze constructs a dialogue between
the instruments in the manner of its title. In his performance directions Henze
stipulates that each of the three instrumentalists may play their part as a
solo as well as in combination with one another. In this performance there are
six sections: piano, viola and guitar alone, followed by two duets and a final
trio. In returning to goal-orientated harmony Henze allies himself with German
romanticism in this work's rhapsodic style and rich textures.
Henze uses Styrian (Austrian) peasant songs as the creative
source for his Neue Volkslieder und Hirtengesänge (New Folk Songs and
Shepherds' Melodies), scoring for a folk-like combination of bassoon (shepherd's
shawm), guitar and string trio. These seven movements from 1996 are derived
from his musical play Oedipus der Tyrann (King Oedipus) of 1983 that was
later withdrawn.
In the opening 'Pastorale' bassoon and guitar take on the
rôles of the peasant musicians and play a total of five varied verses, each one
concluding with a quietly echoing dialogue between the two instruments, with
the string trio providing an energetic accompaniment. The Styrian folk material
is suggested through rhythmic and melodic fragments.
After the brief and melancholy 'Morgenlied' there follows
a more energetic 'Ballade' in which constantly changing metre (heard
first in the guitar) provides a rhythmic landscape to the melodic counterpoint
that unfolds as each instrument enters. There is an extended cadenza and a
concluding reminiscence of the opening. The rustic 'Tanz' gives
prominence to bassoon and guitar in another lively peasant dance which gives
way (as does the tonality) to a 'Rezitativ', featuring just guitar and strings,
now of more expressionistic character. A darker mood with dense string textures
is found in 'Abendlied' where, once again, the bassoon has a prominent
rôle. Henze concludes his suite with an epilogue – 'Ausklang' - where
warm thirds from the strings frame a brief bassoon solo before fading to pianissimo.
David Truslove

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